About the latest video game news for the Xbox 360, Xbox Live, Playstation 3, Playstation Network and Nintendo Wii

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Runes of Magic is a free mmorpg, that is pretty similar looking to World of Warcraft. If you don’t remember, or are new to my blog, I’ve recommended Runes of Magic a while back. It’s a fairly new MMorpg that has many features that rival pay to play mmorpgs. Frogsters mmorpg, Runes of Magic, now has over one million registered users, in a little less then two months of it’s official launch.

Free-To-Play games generally attract more users then Pay to Play games anyway, so it’s success isn’t that much of a surprise. Especially taking into consideration how much of a WoW Clone it looks like. Frogster is over joyous in saying that they’ve been looking for a hit mmorpg for two years, and finally found one with Runes of Magic.

Frogster has also teamed up with BitRaider to allow the game to be downloaded at a faster pace. Some people are complaining that for a game company to succeed they need to copy off of another one’s success. Such as how Frogster is seemingly copying off of World of Warcrafts success. Of course, many do not think that way. To me, a good game is a good game. I doubt Runes of Magic is affecting World of Warcraft sales in the slightest, and as far as I’m concerned, they are targetting two different audiences. So it’s all fair game. I personally have played this game, it’s pretty fun for mmorpg fans.

The next project Blizzard is working on is not a sequel to any of their previous games. It is a completely new mmorpg being made from the ground up.

There was a forum post saying that Blizzard hasn’t been advertising any new online games, so they weren’t making one. Zarhym, a Blizzard poster, let it be known that they are making a completely new franchise from the ground up. They said the game hasn’t been advertised because it isn’t far enough in development yet. They referred it to “a shell of a game”. He explains that it is an overwhelming process to develop new art, gameplay mechanics, and lore for the game. He mentioned that Blizzard already stated this, but this is news to me.

This is Blizzards first new game in a while, it’ll be exciting to see what they manage to do and accomplish with this game.

Free Radical was in trouble of shutting down apparently, and needed to be purchased by another company. Crytek, the creators of the Far Cry and Crysis series, ended up purchasing Free Radical.

Crytek purchased Free Radical back in February, and later layed off over 140 employees whom were labeled as “redundant”. CEO, Cevat Yerli, says that Crytek was chosen to purchase Free Radical, over the other choices, because Crytek gave them the opportunity to create the games they’ve always wanted to create. They are given the chance to “grow”.

Whether Timesplitters 4 is included in one of the games they’ve always wanted to create, no one knows. But we can hope, seeing the concept art that was released for Timesplitters 4 and Starwars Battlefront III. Crysis is a big company, being the makers of Crysis, I have hope that they can really improve and help the Free Radical team to make big games and projects to come. Free Radical should be happy that they’re paired with Crytek now.

First off, the game introduces you to the Nazi zombies gameplay. Which is rather self explanatory because you are killing Nazi zombies. But, coming in June, Activision and Treyarch is bringing a little something new to the table. To come with the 2nd Map Pack to be released for the hit FPS Call of Duty: World at War.

The Zombie Swamp (Shi No Zuma) is this Map Packs new experience that brings you into a swamp with dead Japanese troops rising for revenge apparently. A misty swamp environment fitting for the Japanese to sneak up on and take advantage of you in. This level will feature perk machines, traps, flaming hell hounds and the new Wunderwaffe DG-2.

This map pack also introduces 3 more multiplayer maps and the one new zombie map pack introduced above. You’ll be battling in a Russian Trainyard in Corrosion, fighting close quarters in Sub Pens, and fighting for controlof a bridge in Banzai. This map pack sounds pretty fun for those with Call of Duty World at War already. The new Zombie map sounds fun to play, killing Japanese Zombies in a misty forest, sounds like a fun time to me.

Until now, Valve has been a bit vague with details on the Survival Pack expansion that’s headed for release next week. The pack is headed for release on both the Xbox 360 and PC. Valve goes into detail on this new “Survival” mode on the Left 4 Dead blog.

Their goal for the Survival expansion was to create a mode distinct from the Campaign or Versus. They heightened the pace of the spawning of Zombies in this mode, starting from slow and steadily rising into short spawn times. They said the amount of zombies killed in this mode often outnumbers an entire campaign. The sessions are supposed to last around 10 minutes or less.

They go into great detail about the spawn times and pace, in comparison to the campaign mode. If you manage to survive long enough, Tanks will begin to respawn every15 seconds and Hordes like every 5 seconds. They included a chart to show how the spawn times progress on the blog. It sounds like A LOT of fun, especially when you’re playing with your friends or something.